The couple was shot to death in their sleep at their estate in Montecito. The two leading suspects and a key witness had moved to Israel. The investigators and all the files in the case were in Santa Barbara. Sheriff's detectives had spent almost two years trying to determine who killed Jack and Carmen Hively, and now the biggest stumbling block in the case was geography.

An incendiary device used to ignite a fire in Santa Barbara that claimed one life and more than 500 homes has been shipped to a laboratory for fingerprint-testing, but investigators said Friday they are not "even close" to finding the arsonist responsible for the most destructive Southern California blaze in at least three decades. "We don't have a person or a car we can focus on right now," said Thomas E. Buckley, a U.S.

An incendiary device used to ignite a fire in Santa Barbara that claimed one life and more than 500 homes has been shipped to a laboratory for fingerprint testing, but investigators said Friday they are not "even close" to finding the arsonist responsible for the most destructive Southern California blaze in at least three decades. "We don't have a person or a car we can focus on right now," said Thomas E. Buckley, a U.S.

Allstate Sues Over Alleged Conspiracy: Allstate Insurance Co. filed suit Thursday, claiming that it is not obliged to defend or indemnify a woman accused of conspiring to kill her husband. The U.S. District Court suit, filed in Los Angeles, says Cynthia Lyerla of Santa Barbara was sued by her mother-in-law for conspiring to murder Harold Lyerla. A man was convicted of the murder, but Cynthia Lyerla has not been charged.

Authorities arrested a fourth person in the Santa Barbara County slaying of a Caltrans engineer who was shot to death on a secluded stretch of sand used by nudists at El Capitan State Beach. Sheriff's deputies and a special weapons and tactics team surrounded an apartment in Roseville, near Sacramento, and arrested Rickey Lee Rogers, 24, in the slaying Sept. 21 of Phil Bogdanoff.

The widow of a man who was shot to death Sept. 21 on a Santa Barbara-area beach was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport, police said. Diana Bogdanoff, 41, was taken into custody for investigation of the shooting death of Phillip Bogdanoff, 49, in a secluded cove at El Capitan State Beach, an area used by nudists.

Phillip Bogdanoff, a civil engineer for the California Department of Transportation, took the afternoon off and was sunbathing nude at a secluded beach with his wife when two clothed men approached. In an apparent random act of violence in an unlikely place, one of the men pulled a gun and shot Bogdanoff to death. Bogdanoff, 49, and his wife, Diana, 41, had spread a blanket on the sand on Thursday about half a mile south of Refugio State Beach, an area known as a nude beach, said Sgt.

David Kenneth Kurtzman readily admitted stabbing to death a 29-year-old drifter in a downtown park in Santa Barbara in 1985. The question for the jury was whether to accept the prep school student's defense that he killed in the honest but unreasonably mistaken belief that his victim was a member of a local gang that had threatened his friends.

A San Francisco investment broker has died at a hospital of injuries suffered in an attack at a Solvang restaurant, authorities said Sunday. Claxton A. Long, 47, a senior vice president of Sutro & Co., died Friday night at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara. A 32-year-old welder was being held on suspicion of murder for allegedly attacking Long early Friday.